• 78% are planning to increase the use of cloud for BI and data management in the next 12 months.
• 46% of organisations prefer public cloud platforms for cloud BI, analytics and data management deployments.
• Cloud BI adoption increased in respondent companies from 29% to 43% from 2013 to 2016.
• Almost half of organisations using cloud BI (46%) use a public cloud for BI and data management compared to less than a third (30%) for hybrid cloud and 24% for private cloud.

These and many other insights are from the BARC Research and Eckerson Group Study, BI and Data Management in the Cloud: Issues and Trends published January 2017 (39 pp., PDF, no opt-in). Business Application Research Center (BARC) is a research and consulting firm that concentrates on enterprise software including business intelligence (BI), analytics and data management. Eckerson Group is a research and consulting firm focused on serving the needs of business intelligence (BI) and analytic leaders in Fortune 2000 organisations worldwide. The study is based on interviews completed in September and October 2016. 370 respondents participated in the survey globally.

Given the size of the sample, the results aren’t representative of the global BI and analytics user base. The study’s results provide an interesting glimpse into analytics and BI adoption today, however. For a description of the methodology, please see page 31 of the study.

Key insights from the study include the following:

Public cloud is the most preferred deployment platform for cloud BI and analytics, and the larger the organization toe more likely they are using private clouds. 46% of organizations selected public cloud platforms as their preferred infrastructure for supporting their BI, analytics, and data management initiatives in 2016. 30% are relying on a hybrid cloud platform and 24%, private clouds. With public cloud platforms becoming more commonplace in BI and analytics deployments, the need for greater PaaS- and IaaS-level orchestration becomes a priority. The larger the organization, the more likely they are using private clouds (33%). Companies with between 250 to 2,500 employees are the least likely to be using private clouds (16%).

Dashboard-based reporting (76%), ad-hoc analysis and exploration (57%) and dashboard authoring (55%) are the top three Cloud BI use cases. Respondents are most interested in adding advanced and predictive analytics (53%), operational planning and forecasting (44%), strategic planning and simulation (44%) in the next year. The following graphic compares primary use cases and planned investments in the next twelve months. SelectHub has created a useful Business Intelligence Tools Comparison here that provides insights into this area.

Power users dominate the use of cloud BI and analytics solutions, driving more complex use cases that include ad-hoc analysis (57%) and advanced report and dashboard creation (55%). Casual users are 20% of all cloud BI and analytics, with their most common use being for reporting and dashboards (76%). Customers and suppliers are an emerging group of cloud BI and analytics users as more respondent companies create self-service web-based apps to streamline external reporting.

Data integration between cloud applications/databases (51%) and providing data warehouses and data marts (50%) are the two most common data management strategies in use to support BI and analytics solutions today. Respondent organizations are using the cloud to integration cloud applications with each other and with on-premises applications (46%).  The study also found that as more organizations move to the cloud, there’s a corresponding need to support hybrid cloud architectures. Cloud-based data warehouses are primarily being built to support net new applications versus existing apps on-premise. Data integration is essential for the ongoing operations of cloud-based and on-premise ERP systems. A useful comparison of ERP systems can be found here.

Data integration between on-premises and cloud applications dominates use cases across all company sizes, with 48% of enterprises leading in adoption. Enterprises are also prioritizing providing data warehouses and data marts (48%), the pre-processing of data (38%) and data integration between cloud applications and databases (38%). The smaller a company is the more critical data integration becomes. 63% of small companies with less than 250 employees are prioritizing data integration between cloud applications and databases (63%).

Tools for data exploration (visual discovery) adopted grew the fastest in the last three years, increasing from 20% adoption in 2013 to 49% in 2016. BI tools increased slightly from 55% to 62% and BI servers dropped from 56% to 51%. Approximately one in five respondent organizations (22%) added analytical applications in 2016.

The main reasons for adopting cloud BI and analytics differ by size of the company, with cost (57%) being the most important for mid-sized businesses between 250 to 2.5K employees. Consistent with previous studies, small companies’ main reason for adopting cloud BI and analytics include flexibility (46%), reduced maintenance of hardware and software (43%), and cost (38%). Enterprises with more than 2.5K employees are adopting cloud BI and analytics for greater scalability (48%), cost (40%) and reduced maintenance of hardware and software (38%). The following graphic compares the most important reason for adopting cloud BI, analytics and data management by the size of the company.

In order to ensure that patient outcomes are constantly being improved upon it is important that the speed of change within the biotechnology sector occurs at an exponential rate. However, this continued drive for innovation puts immense pressure on IT departments to develop new technologies at speed, while also making sure that they do this cost effectively.

Add to this the fact that, more so than other industries, biotech firms are extremely tightly regulated. As a result, IT groups within this industry are often reluctant to introduce more complexity into what is already a very complex environment. To them, expanding a data centre can often feel a whole lot easier than navigating the regulations of the cloud.  Despite this, growth in the demand for cloud computing in life sciences research and development is escalating due to the benefits it brings to the industry – benefits like exceeding regulatory requirements, for example.

At iland, we have worked with many companies in the healthcare, life sciences and biotech industries. Therefore, we know from experience that the implementation of cloud computing in biotechnology empowers organisations with the control and flexibility needed to lead the way in both the research world as well as the businesses world. For example, we recently worked with a US based biotechnology organisation on their backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategy, and were able to drive global data centre consolidation with host-based replication to the iland cloud. As a result, their DR testing and auditing processes were greatly simplified and streamlined which drove significant cost savings as well as compliance assurance.  

If you still need convincing here are three key benefits that we believe cloud brings to biotech organisations: 

Processing big data

When the Human Genome Project began it was one of the most extensive research projects in the field to date costing billions of pounds and lasting over a decade. These days, thanks largely to cloud technology, it can be done in just 26 hours. Things such as drug R&D, clinical research as well as a whole host of other areas have benefited just as much from the rapid growth of computational power. The better your technology is at crunching huge sets of data, the quicker you can innovate.

Cloud computing within the biotech sector can take big data analysis to the next level by means of performance, connectivity, on-demand infrastructure and flexible provisioning. Labs can also benefit from immense computing power without the cost and complexity of running big onsite server rooms. They can also scale up at will in order to make use of new research and ideas almost instantly.

Concerns have been voiced that so called scientific computing in the cloud may make results less reproducible. One concern is that cloud computing will be a computing ‘black box’ that obscures details needed to accurately interpret the results of computational analyses. In actual fact, by leveraging the application program interfaces (APIs) in the iland cloud, biotech customers are able to integrate cloud data back into on-premises IT systems to ensure that data analyses done in the cloud can be easily shared and consumed by other applications. Essentially, cloud computing services bring more players to the table to solve the giant puzzle. It’s a win-win situation from an economic and patient standpoint, and several big name companies are jumping on the biotech cloud bandwagon. 

Compliance and access control

Biotech companies need to maintain strong access and authentication controls, while also being able to collaborate easily. For this reason audit trails and other measures are often required to verify that information has not been improperly altered, and that good experimental and manufacturing procedures have been followed. At the same time biotechnologists need to be able to access and share data across multiple departments or even multiple companies.

Cloud computing in biotechnology makes this all possible. The iland cloud, for instance, centralises data, ensuring security and data sovereignty while facilitating collaboration. It supports extensive user and role based access control, two-factor authentication and integrity monitoring to prevent improper access and changes. In addition to data encryption, vulnerability scanning and intrusion detection, these measures facilitate security and compliance, without disrupting the internal workflow.

Real-time reporting

Complex regulatory requirements and logistics combined with niche markets make efficiency paramount within biotechnology. Even minor mistakes as a result of sloppy process management can easily result in major issues. Real-time operational reporting dramatically improves efficiency, quality control and decision making, allowing organisations to react instantly to challenges and opportunities, both internal and external.

As well as enhanced billing visibility and resource management functions, the release of our latest Secure Cloud Services means that the iland cloud now includes on-demand security and compliance reports. This advanced cloud management functionality is designed to foster strategic, self-sufficient control of a cloud environment, optimising overall cloud usage and costs to drive business initiatives and growth.

Without a shadow of a doubt, cloud technology can help biotechnology companies build the future. From research and development to marketing, computing affects everything your organisation does. With rich experience in the biotech, healthcare and life sciences sector, you should talk to iland today to find out how our cloud hosting services can give you the power to develop at the speed of thought, not the speed of compliance or processing. 

Read more: Why the cloud could hold the cure to diseases

Cloud delivery of enterprise applications is rapidly transforming the software industry, IT organisations, and the modern data centre. The as-a-service model for delivering advanced software functionality has moved into mainstream acceptance. IDC projects the cloud software market to grow to $151.6 billion by 2020 with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.6% – far exceeding the growth of traditional software.

Enterprise IT organisations are embracing cloud software for good reason. SaaS versions of enterprise applications introduce new innovations faster than traditional software. Faster public networks, pervasive mobile devices, and modern development paradigms enable excellent user experience. Powerful cloud-based data centres serve up sophisticated real-time analytics functionality to users accessing applications from a variety of devices.  And probably most significantly, the adoption of SaaS frees up IT resources and simplifies enterprise data centres. 

The adoption of SaaS and cloud based software is a cross industry phenomenon. Health tech, fintech, retail tech offerings are emerging alongside enterprise applications-as-a-service (e.g. ERP, CRM, HR, accounting).  SaaS versions of enterprise applications to smaller businesses that never had the option to host complicated applications on premises.  Looking ahead, the rise of IoT enabled businesses – including smart industry, connected health, and smart city oriented companies – will also be delivered through as-a-service offerings.   These applications all share common infrastructure requirements.  This growing demand is giving rise to a new generation of data centre technologies that address the needs of as-a-service businesses.  

Infrastructure needs for ‘as-a-service’ businesses

Modern SaaS and cloud-based software place new demands on data centre infrastructure.  Some demands are simple evolutions of the requirements for traditional enterprise application infrastructure. Other are unique to the as-a-Service model where a single application instance is supporting many different organizations.

Modern SaaS businesses compete on user experience and functionality. Database platforms, server, and storage infrastructure must deliver the performance needed to deliver a positive user experience.   Many modern applications incorporate sophisticated real-time analytics functionality.  For instance, eCommerce sites may want to make real-time recommendations as part of a personalised shopping experience.  Real-time analytics put complicated workload requirements on underlying infrastructure and require unique approaches to maintaining consistently high performance. 

Part of staying competitive on user experience and functionality is the ability to constantly introduce new versions of a software offering.  One of the benefits of cloud software is the ability to roll out new software versions to all users extremely efficiently.  Modern software development organisations have embraced this concept with Agile development methodologies and by incorporating DevOps thinking into their organisations.  As new functionality is rolled out continually, the underlying data centre infrastructure must be as agile as the application. Rigid management paradigms and complexity have no place in the modern data centre.

Probably the most significant requirement for as-a-service infrastructure is the need for scalability. Modern SaaS business models are based on the principle of scale.  Scalable infrastructure strategies are critical as underlying business growth drives growth in users, in devices, in transactions, and in raw data.   Infrastructure solutions that cost-effectively deliver performance, simplicity, and reliability for a single enterprise often do not support the scalability needs of SaaS and cloud software.

Transformative technologies for the ‘as-a-service’ world

Service virtualization transformed the economics of data centre management, paving the way for the as-a-service world.   Beyond that, several infrastructure technologies are continuing to transform the modern data centre.

Solid state storage: Enterprise storage platforms built for solid state disk technologies are rapidly taking share from traditional hard-drive based arrays.   All-flash arrays that leverage the latest solid-state technologies and incorporate efficient data reduction technologies enable a step-change in performance with costs competitive with traditional storage.

Software defined data centres: Across the data centre stack (including servers, networking, and storage), software defined principles enable a new class of highly flexible, highly cost-efficient infrastructures solutions.  Custom hardware based solutions are unable to innovate at the rate of software-defined solutions that can ride the commodity hardware curves. 

Convergence: High speed data centre networking technologies including NVMeF will transform the notion of shared storage infrastructure. By connecting server resources to shared storage with this extremely low latency interconnect, data centres will achieve a new level of performance and flexibility.

New database paradigms:   As the server and storage layers of the data centre transform, database and application development principles will shift to gain full advantage.  Traditional RDBMS technologies will be augmented or supplanted with alternative database technologies like NoSQL/NewSQL to more efficiently deliver advanced functionality like real-time analytics. 

‘As-a-service’ data centre winners and losers

The rapid growth of SaaS and cloud software is not reducing the market for data centre technologies, it is driving a massive shift in who is buying these solutions and what their buying criteria are.  Data centre technologies that have been successful on premises, will not necessarily have the same success in the as-a-service world.  Legacy solutions saddled with rigid hardware based architectures are unlikely to keep pace with more agile, software based solutions.   Technologies with proprietary interfaces will lose to those that offer developers access through open standards.  Complex technologies requiring specialist support resources will give way to simpler solutions that can be managed by generalists.  

The as-a-service data centre will be architected for scale, for simplicity, and for the applications that will drive the future of digital business and digital lifestyle.

The Dell-EMC mega-merger is starting to bear significant fruit: according to the latest analysis from Synergy Research, which shows a three-way tie alongside Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) at the top of the cloud infrastructure equipment market.

With the overall revenues for cloud infrastructure equipment surpassing $70 billion in 2016 – or in other words, about $3 billion more than Dell shelled out for EMC, VMware et al – Dell’s stock has risen considerably since 2016’s second quarter, with Cisco and HPE suffering slight dips in market share.

Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualisation software made up fully 95% of the overall market, with the remainder comprising cloud security and management. As readers of this publication will be aware, Cisco rules the roost when it comes to networking, while HPE has a clear lead in cloud servers. Dell EMC has the lead on storage, with Microsoft featuring heavily due to server OS and virtualisation and IBM ‘maintaining a strong position across a range of cloud technology markets’, Synergy added.

The previous quarter’s analysis, issued in December, saw HPE just ahead of Cisco with Dell EMC catching up fast behind.

“While spend on cloud services and infrastructure is already huge it is still relatively early days in the transition of enterprise workloads to the cloud,” said John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy. “That means that success in the cloud infrastructure market is vitally important to IT vendors and they will be fighting long and hard to maximise their market shares.”

The move from Dell to acquire EMC, first announced in October 2015, had mixed critical reaction at the time; one Wired article infamously described the two companies, alongside the likes of HP, Cisco, IBM, and Oracle, as “the walking dead”. With the deal officially finalised in September 2016, the company hopes its hardware and software ‘will power customers’ traditional data centres and act as the backbone to various private or hybrid cloud computing scenarios’, as Fortune puts it, with hyper-converged and software-defined at the forefront.

SYS-CON Events announced today that T-Mobile will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
As America’s Un-carrier, T-Mobile US, Inc., is redefining the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services through leading product and service innovation. The Company’s advanced nationwide 4G LTE network delivers outstanding wireless experiences to 67.4 million customers who are unwilling to compromise on quality and value.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that Ocean9will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Ocean9 provides cloud services for Backup, Disaster Recovery (DRaaS) and instant Innovation, and redefines enterprise infrastructure with its cloud native subscription offerings for mission critical SAP workloads.

read more

2016 was a year of dips and dives, twists and turns. Judging by the first couple of weeks of the new year, it’s reasonable to expect 2017 will be another roller coaster year for providers, patients, suppliers and payers. As president and CMO of LeanTaaS, a growth-stage innovator of cloud-based solutions for healthcare, I have a front-car seat in partnership with the 30+ leading health systems with which we work all over the country.

read more

In his keynote at 18th Cloud Expo, Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise, provided an overview of the evolution of the Internet and the Database and the future of their combination – the Blockchain. Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settlement products to hedge funds and investment banks. After, he co-founded a revenue cycle management company where he learned about Bitcoin and eventually Ethereum.

read more